WHEW! OK, I’m finally
WHEW! OK, I’m finally home and can take a serious look at the TN article below. I am not a heartless ideologue. Parents who hurt their kids, IMO, deserve the worst punishments society can devise. Drawing-and-quartering comes to mind. The article is ostensibly about a poor 4-year-old boy who was slain, apparently by his parents. The lede, though, immediately raises alarms:
An unknown number of Nashville children are being missed by the educational system and falling beyond the reach of a possible safety net because the resources aren’t available to track them, officials said.
Danger! Danger! This type of paragraph often leads to “some people may claim to be homeschooling but may just be using it as a cover-up of abuse.”
Schools provide ”a system of checks and balances to see that a child is properly fed, clothed and emotionally stable,” said Metro Police Department spokesman Don Aaron. ”If a child is not in the school system, you lose one of the checks and balances.”
And, we all know which kids aren’t in the “system.”
[S]chools are an important safety net, said Carla Aaron, Department of Children’s Services spokeswoman…But the system fails when children don’t go to school, said Catherine Knowles, director of the Metro Schools Homeless Education Program.
OK, they’re not talking about homeschoolers. But…
Regardless of the resources, advocates believe that it’s incumbent upon the community to call the local school system and report when they see, or suspect, that a child is not being educated.
Watch out TN homeschoolers.